I'm Your Man (39 page)

“I was so brokenhearted by this whole thing,” says Lissauer. “I was doing dozens of other albums and Leonard wasn't selling a ton, so I wasn't losing big dollars or anything, I just was disappointed by how I was treated. I've always said, it's not Leonard, it's Marty [Machat].” There appeared to be no other
Rebecca
songs among the outtakes, which included “Misty Blue,” “The Faith,” “Billy Sunday” (an unreleased song Leonard would sing on several dates of the 1979–80 tour) and “Do I Have to Dance All Night,” a dance song recorded at a 1976 concert in Paris and released as a single (backed with “The Butcher”) in Europe.

Recent Songs
was released in September 1979, two years after
Death of a Ladies' Man
—a quicker follow-up than fans had come to expect from Leonard. It was dedicated to Irving Layton, Leonard's “friend and inspiration, the incomparable master of the inner language.” The portrait of Leonard that took up the entire front cover was based on a photo shot by his friend and onetime lover Hazel Field; the illustrated version made him look less haggard and more Dustin Hoffmanesque than in the photograph. After the incongruous rage and bombast of
Death of a Ladies' Man,
its largely acoustic style and graceful arrangements, along with the romantic gypsy-folk flavor of the violin and the Near East exoticism of the oud, were greeted by critics as a return to form. The
New York Times
placed it among its top ten albums of the year.
Rolling Stone
wrote, “There's not a cut on
Recent Songs
without something to offer.”
11
Larry “Ratso” Sloman, reviewing for
High Times,
predicted it would be “Cohen's biggest LP” and said it was “sure to go silver, if not gold.”
12

But John Lissauer was correct; the album did not sell many copies. Despite the warm critical response, it barely sold at all in the U.S. and failed to make the charts in Canada. In the UK it reached No. 53—but this was the lowest position yet for a Leonard Cohen studio album; even the widely unpopular
Death of a Ladies' Man
had made it to No 35.
NME,
echoing the generally middling reviews it received in Britain, described it as “Cohen's most accomplished album in musical terms,” but took it to task for its “detached, almost impersonal air” and lyrics that “tend towards a rather fey obscurity.”
13
But Leonard was pleased with
Recent Songs.
“I like that album,” he would say more than twenty years later. “I think I like it the best.”
14

The
Recent Songs
tour began in Sweden, in October 1979. Leonard's band for the fifty-one-date European tour was Passenger—Roscoe Beck, Steve Meador, Bill Ginn, Mitch Watkins and Paul Ostermeyer—plus John Bilezikjian and Raffi Hakopian. “It was world music before the term existed,” says Beck. “Leonard and I have talked about what a unique group it was for its day.” Leonard was also accompanied by two of his finest female backing vocalists, Jennifer Warnes, who had toured with him at the beginning of the decade, and a newcomer named Sharon Robinson.

Robinson had been singing and dancing in Las Vegas in the Ann-Margret revue when Warnes, who had taken on the task of finding a second backing singer, called out of the blue, asking if she would like to audition for Leonard Cohen's European tour. Robinson was not familiar with Leonard's work, but Europe sounded good. “Jennifer vetted me beforehand at her house on her own, then she brought me to audition for Leonard.” Sharon remembers, “The whole band was there. I was a little nervous, but Leonard, sitting on the couch, seemed to exude a really bright kind of energy and a real warmth and friendliness that I really appreciated. I felt at home right away.”

Helping make Leonard feel at home was Roshi. He traveled with the band on the tour bus, dressed in his robes, reading quietly through his big square spectacles as Europe rolled by on the other side of the glass. “He came to the concerts and he was there backstage,” Beck recalls. “It's very odd, his presence was at once large and yet almost invisible at times. Not a lot of words were spoken, and he seemed to disappear into the wall of the greenroom. He is really a Zen master!” It was in tribute, perhaps, that when Leonard sang “Bird on the Wire” he changed the “worm on a hook” into “a monk bending over a book.” On the long drives between cities, Leonard and the band would sing “Pauper Sum Ego” (“I Am a Poor Man”), a monastic chant in Latin in the round. During the long bus rides, Leonard and Jennifer Warnes cowrote a song about a saint called “Song of Bernadette.” Sometimes Bilezikjian would go to the back of the bus when the rest of the band were in their bunks, sleeping, and play his oud and violin, “softly so I wouldn't wake anyone up.” But when everyone was up, he remembers, “all of us would sing Leonard's songs. They became like our anthem. We'd come up with a vocal arrangement, singing as if we had our instruments. I think Leonard was touched by that. I saw a big smile on his face.” As on their 1972 tour, they had a filmmaker with them on the road. Harry Rasky, a Canadian, was making a documentary on Leonard for CBC. Their number increased again when Henry Lewy flew out to join them for the UK tour—a hectic eleven shows in twelve days—recording the concerts with the aim of making a live album. Despite Leonard's sounding less improvisational and significantly more cheerful on this tour than he had on his last live album, 1973's
Live Songs
, Columbia chose not to release the album recorded on the 1979 tour—at least not until two decades later, when it finally appeared in 2000 under the title
Field Commander Cohen
.
*
The tour came to an end in Brighton in December, sixteen days before the end of the seventies. After two months off (two weeks of which Leonard spent in a monastery)—it resumed in the eighties with a successful tour of Australia.

When the band members flew back to their respective homes, according to Jennifer Warnes, they did not know what to do with themselves. “[There were] two or three divorces right after the tour, and I think they were simply because the mates couldn't understand what had happened. There had been severe altering of personalities. Roscoe started wearing Armani suits. It was a mess. We'd call each other and say, ‘What do we do now?' The aperture of the heart had been broken open.”
15
Beck and Warnes were now a couple, having become romantically involved halfway across Europe. Like the rest of the band, they wanted nothing more than to take the tour across America. “We couldn't mount enough interest to put one together,” says Beck. Curiously though, at around this time an interview with Leonard appeared in the U.S. celebrity weekly magazine
People
.

Readers more used to stories about movie stars and the Betty Ford Center read how a Canadian singer-songwriter who could not sell records in America recovered from his “brief periods of collapse” in Roshi's “center for meditation and manual labor.” Leonard explained, “When I go there, it's like scraping off the rust. . . . I'm not living with anybody the rest of the time. Nobody can live with me. I have almost no personal life.” As this last statement was a concept alien to
People,
they also interviewed his former partner. Suzanne was quoted as saying of Leonard, “I believed in him. He had moved people in the right direction, toward gentleness. But then I became very alone—the proof of the poetry just wasn't there.” The article reported Suzanne's claim that Leonard had not kept to their child-support agreement. Leonard in turn complained about Suzanne's “Miami consumer habits,” adding, “My only luxuries are airplane tickets to go anywhere at any time. All I need is a table, chair and bed.”
16

Harry Rasky's documentary
Song of Leonard Cohen,
which was broadcast in Canada in 1980, made a far more dignified setting for Leonard. The film opens with Leonard sitting in the window—that most symbolic of places for him—in his apartment in Montreal. The apartment looks sparse and uncluttered—much more like Leonard's home in L.A. and his house on Hydra than the nearby cottage crammed with knickknacks and books where he had lived with Suzanne and their children. This has white walls, bare; painted floorboards; an old wooden table, and a small claw-footed bathtub. Leonard also appears to be surrounded by friends and supporters. Hazel Field, who lives in the neighboring apartment, is seen clambering over the balcony, all long limbs and ironed hair, carrying a cup of coffee for Leonard, and Irving Layton drops by, bringing a young, blond companion with him. The two sit spellbound when Leonard plays them his song “The Window” on a boom box.

“Leonard was a genius from the first moment I saw him,” Layton states, adding, “[His songs have] the quality of mystery, of doom, of menace, of sadness, the dramatic quality that you find in the Scottish ballads, the English ballads” from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Asked by Rasky if he found Leonard's songs sad or joyful he answers, “Both. What I like particularly in Leonard's songs is what I call the depressive manic quality. If you notice, in some of his most telling and moving songs, he always begins on a note of pain, of anguish, of sadness, and then somehow or other works himself up into a state of exaltation, of euphoria, as though he had released himself from the devil, melancholy, pain.”
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Then, Jews, Layton says, “have always had the gift of anxiety and pain and solitude.”
18
The Wandering Canadian tells Rasky that “he is tired of moving around” and would like to “stay in one place for a while.” The problem is that “there always seemed good reasons to move.
19

On October 24, 1980, Leonard was back in Europe for five more weeks of concerts. Jennifer Warnes chose not to join him this time, leaving Sharon Robinson as his sole backing singer. By this time Leonard and Sharon had become close. In Israel, where the tour ended, they started writing a song together, called “Summertime.” Sharon, says Leonard, “had this melody that I hadn't written a lyric for but I really loved.” In the lobby of their Tel Aviv hotel there was a baby grand piano, so she played it to Leonard, who liked it. “Right on the spot,” she says, “he started looking for the appropriate lyric.” Although Leonard did not record the song himself, their first cowrite would be covered by both Diana Ross and Roberta Flack.

The tour ended with two dates in Tel Aviv. Sharon remembers Leonard taking the band on a trip to the Dead Sea and also to visit a kibbutz. When it was over, Leonard flew to New York. In his room at the Algonquin Hotel, he prepared to celebrate Hanukkah with Adam and Lorca. He had brought candles and a prayer book with him, and also a notebook. When Hanukkah was over and the children gone, he opened it to the page where he had started to write a powerful and beautiful hymn of surrender, titled “If It Be Your Will.”

A
nd so the curtain came down and Leonard stepped out quietly through the backstage door. It seemed as good a time as any to make an exit from the music business. The tour was over and, though the concerts had been good, his album had not sold well. The world had other things to occupy it; Leonard did not think he would be missed.

Had you lost interest, or simply run out of steam?

“I don't know, I suppose it reflected a certain insecurity about what I was doing. I kind of lost the handle of it, I thought. Although in retrospect, even in examining the work of other writers, that's a very common and almost routine assessment of one's work at different periods. Often one's best work is at the time considered inadequate or incompetent. I certainly struggled with those notions, and not just as a writer— but, as any man or woman locates a large component of their self-respect in their work, it's always an issue.”

Did you have any plans for how you would spend this time away?

“My children were living in the South of France and I spent a lot of time visiting them there and going back and forth. The pieces in ‘Book of Mercy' were coming and I was writing the album that ended up being called
Various Positions
. At a certain point my work was so slow and it became such an ordeal that I was discarding much of what I did, so I think it was legitimate for me to say that my life and my work was in disarray.”

The next four years were spent out of the public eye. If you were looking for Leonard you might find him in the monastery on Mount Baldy, in his apartment in Montreal, in his house on Hydra or in France, in a trailer at the bottom of a path leading to the house where Suzanne and the children lived. Leonard flew to France often.

Adam Cohen, speaking some three decades later, described it as “admirable, the way in which he managed to keep in touch with us, despite the . . . domestic unrest, shall we say, the post-divorce antagonisms.”
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Things between Leonard and Suzanne remained contentious, although in Suzanne's opinion, “We worked it out—over many years with many highs and lows—better than most that I've ever met and heard of since. The voyeurs and gossipers will only want to exaggerate the difficult times and the ill-willed will be suspicious of the best.”

The house that Suzanne found and Leonard purchased was on a seventeenth-century farm in Bonnieux that had been owned and run by monks. The surrounding countryside was littered with old, rural churches. Sometimes Suzanne took the children there, “although,” she says, “I didn't whisper sweet nothings in the children's ears about Jesus walking in the Garden.” She was aware that Leonard “would have liked me to educate them with at least the knowledge of the Jewish tradition in some way,” but there were no synagogues in the area, she says. Later, when she and the children lived in Manhattan, she “looked into it in earnest, but the rabbi I spoke to just didn't make it accessible to me and I gave up. And to do it without Leonard didn't make sense to me.” Leonard took on the children's Jewish education himself. “I told them the stories, I told them the prayers, I showed them how to light the candles, I gave them the A to Z of the important holidays,” he says, and he celebrated the holidays with them.